After image
by Lena Carr
Summary: Afterimage: n, an impression of a vivid sensation retained after the stimulus has ceased. 3,700 words, AU after S1-19, "Only Light In The Darkness." They were broken when I found them, that's why some of the pieces are still missing.


**A/N:** At the end.

* * *

Every day – _every single day_ \- he catches sight of May.

* * *

In that first hour, Ward saw agents everywhere – SHIELD, HYDRA, random government alphabets sent out to take them in. Even before they broke free of the snowline, his head was swiveling – left, right, up, back. Counting the heartbeats until Coulson returned, likely with reinforcements. Watching for any sign that May had changed her mind –

\- _If he thought she would, he never would have taken them out on the same path. But this was Melinda May, the legendary Cavalry, and did not expect her to turn around_ –

\- and backtracked to find Ward hustling a half-protesting Skye through the snow away from Provenance Base as fast as he could drag her. If May had caught them, then, they – _he_ – would have been finished. Impossible for Ward to have talked his way out of Konnel trussed up in a recess by the back entrance behind them and half the stored semtex wired to the Bus.

He lied to May for half a year, but only, Ward knows, _only because she let me_.

With Skye still loudly griping about some tech gadget she'd left behind –

\- _Not the drive, that's in his pocket, safe, he knows where that is, the world is full of secrets and he needs every last one to bargain with –_

-and stumbling clumsily through the snow beside him, he'd never hear May coming. Nor a HYDRA kill squad. Or…

It was all he could do to keep calm, keep his hand off his firearm and his grip light on Skye's arm.

"What are we going to do?" Skye demanded, once they hit a paved road. Half a klick down the highway, a pickup pulled out of the service station with a red haired woman behind the wheel. Ward forced his breathing down. Much too soon for anyone to have put Romanoff on their tail.

Skye tugged at his arm. "Grant, talk to me." At the gas station, a woman with flat cheekbones and long dark hair walked out of the side door. Ward'd had no give left, he'd been that tense, but the woman was First Nations, not Chinese. "You have a plan, right?"

He did.

_Run._

_Run and pray they don't catch you._

For about a thousand values of _they_.

Even then, he knew there would be only one that counted.

* * *

By sunset, he has them across the border. It's a risk, but in Canada they are clearly Yanks. In Minnesota, they're just another pair of eastern tourists, out for the snowboarding. He gets a haircut, talks Skye into streaking her hair with amber highlights. Together with the wash job Skye did on their identities, it's enough to fool organic assets.

As quickly as he can, as competently as he can, they disappear.

He knows it isn't good enough.

* * *

Ward had known May's legend before he knew her name. He had seen her fight before he had ever shaken her hand.

A training tape, just another god-damn canned lesson, in thirty-five months of endless tape and lecture and late night study, because Ops only _looked_ glamorous –

\- _Twenty three in the cohort by that point, half-bored-to-tears half-dead exhausted and none wanting another hour in a lecture hall –_

\- but when the lights went down it was one of the SHIELD legends on the screen, a pale woman with scarlet hair, in conservative street clothes, going at it hammer and tongs with another woman, this one dark haired and Asian. Thirty seconds in, and half the men in the class were squirming in their seats as Romanoff and the dark haired woman –

\- _May –_

\- traded blow for blow and threw each other into the walls. Romanoff had been flash and flair, May smooth power, both of them fighting viciously and without quarter.

A third of the way through the tape, the dynamic changed, as a quartet of operatives – all male, all with body armor and face masks – stepped into the fight, and the women shifted from attacking each other to standing off the four new opponents.

When the fourth one hit the floor, May's head snapped back towards Romanoff. A wide grin spread across her face. The ex-Russian met May's leaping strike halfway.

Ward staggered as he went out of the lecture hall, half hard, half in love.

Garrett's lessons had built on the foundation his brother had laid. There was a lot to like there – to be better than the other guy, to be the one beating, not the one beaten down. To have the taste of blood in your mouth and know it for survival, and better than dying.

But Garrett's lessons had never included the mad _delight_ in May's eyes as she had closed with an opponent.

When Ward met May, eleven years older than the woman in the training tape, the first thing he thought was _still got it_. The next was, _can she teach me to do that?_

It was only after Peru that he realized May had lost that joy in Bahrain, long before Garrett had recruited him.

* * *

In St Louis he trades a tenth of his cash for a broken-down sedan with a touchy clutch. Skye looks at it then at him. "Seriously?"

Ward is sprawled across the back seat, cutting a hole in the seat to secure the emergency cash. They're tucked behind an abandoned warehouse row, he hasn't slept more than thirty minutes in the last thirty hours, they're leaving as soon as he gets the cache finished and he still doesn't know if they're going south or west.

When he answers her, there's more of a snap to his voice than he would like. "What, the ride's not good enough for you?"

"You're not getting the point of upgrades. I traded my van for the Bus. This is…this is the _VISTA_ of transport installs."

That makes no sense, and while he's distracted, the boxcutter slips and nicks the heel of his hand. "Shit."

"What?"

Ward sits up, sucking on the cut. "Damn it."

Skye sets aside her messenger bag and grabs at his hand. "Idiot. Why'd you do that?"

He scowls. "You distracted me." Skye's fingers cup his hand, smoothing over the callouses. Under their pressure, the cut closes before gaping open again. He looks up to find Skye's eyes on him.

"Do I?" she says. He can feel the blood pounding behind his ears. Dehydrated. He needs water, needs to eat.

He opens his mouth to reply, then jerks his head to one side.

"What is it?" Skye's voice is nothing like her fingers – sharp, worried.

The figure Ward had seen in the corner of his eye – long raven hair, glint of metal, wrapt in the darkness-drinking negative space of woven Kevlar – was not there.

"Nothing," Ward says. "Fix me up?"

They are on the road inside of twenty minutes. They reach the turn off to Tennessee before Ward loses the feel of Skye's hands on his.

He still sees black SUVs in his rear view, even when the road is clear.

* * *

SHIELD finds them first. Mentally, Ward gives a middle finger to Garrett and the rest of his morons in HYDRA.

Physically, he puts two rounds center mass into the first three agents through the door before snatching up his bag and bolting for the exit. Skye is ahead of him, laces still flopping around one boot, but moving with fucking dispatch, _finally_, the laptop in her bag and the keys in her fist and she's doing _exactly_ what he told her to do, finally, and not even looking back, but bolting directly –

\- Along the twisting path he laid out for her, two nights before, taking advantage of concealment and the bit of cover available, _that's a girl_ –

\- for the vehicle.

He catches up with her barely ten feet from the car, and she already has the door open and is half in the driver's seat before he jerks her back out. "I got it, get in, go." There's a bitten off whimper as he shoves her in the back, overlaid by the slamming door, and then he's got the Ford in gear and accelerating.

They turn the corner as a sprinting figure burst out of the passageway behind them. May's one shot shatters the driver-side mirror as he forces the wheel left, rear tires losing contact as they round the corner. Then they're on the out bound, moving against the incoming rush hour traffic, and he knows they're going to make it.

Skye clambers into the passenger seat. "Sorry," he says, at the same time she turns to say, "I forgot."

"It's okay," he says, and takes his hand off the stick to pat her leg. "Manual transmission driving lessons come later in the training program."

* * *

He's Skye's SO. He's her supervisor. Worse, he's the reason she's in danger now and the only thing standing between her and two juggernauts of paranoid tension that would grind her into damp dust between them.

He's lied to her from the first moment he saw her.

She's not Melinda May. She's never going to catch him in a half-truth. He's light-years out of her league, and she's never going to catch up. He could leave her behind in a heartbeat, if he ever stopped looking back for her. She wouldn't even leave a shadow at the edge of his vision.

It's only when she's with him that she blinds him.

Skye clouds his judgment worse than LSD, makes his thinking thicker than any quart of scotch. She's a loose cannon with an unknown background and mercurial priorities.

The reasons why he should never end up in bed with Skye are legion.

He does anyway.

* * *

HYDRA finds them four days later. Ward spots them first, and is – despite the alarm, despite the cold fear strumming along his nerves as it translates into adrenaline and motion and the copper taste of _attack_ in his mouth - smug. Because he'd done that much right.

"Up. Go." He says to Skye, but she has already folded up her things and is rising, not looking around, just standing and falling in behind him as he moves for the back door.

They're two steps away from the exit and Ward's already reaching for the handle when something falls over in the alley. He snatches Skye against him, presses her into the corner.

"You can come back," the voice calls from behind them. _Boxed in. Shit._ It's what he gets for getting cocky, but he's already weighing options. Against him, Skye's breath catches. He can't think about that right now. The passageway is dark. The voice is bodiless, the barest hint of a shoulder silhouetted against the front windows. It wavers in and out of focus over Ward's sights, and for an instant he thinks he recognizes May's shrug, dropping a coat that was entangling her arms .

"Bring the girl, bring the drive, and we can deal." It's not a voice he knows. Deep, gravelly, a hint of a German accent.

He does not answer, only pulls Skye with him and down four feet to the next doorway_, it's got to be the stairwell, not the broom closet, please god_, and she takes her eyes off him finally and eases the door open, moves up the stairs like smoke.

They have one man on the roof, only one, and Ward can't shake the feeling they meant for him to escape.

* * *

He parcels the truth out to Skye in bits and drabbles. Small chunks that she can handle. Small enough that he doesn't have to face the frank, terrifying stupidity of what he's doing.

"You…you worked for HYDRA?"

"No. Not HYDRA. Garrett."

"Garrett's HYRDA! It's the same thing!"

_No, only if you let it be._ Like he had.

Skye sighs, so frustrated she clenches her hair in her fists. "Fine. You worked for HYDRA. But you don't anymore."

"No." And because he can't see her eyes, he needs to see her eyes, he reaches out, combs her hair back away from her face. "Not anymore."

Skye tried, at the beginning, to talk him into surrendering, into finding something left of SHIELD to take them in. It wasn't exactly surprising. That she kept it up even after the first SHIELD kill squad ambushed them did give him pause.

Sometime after the third strike team –

\- _The third one she knew about –_

Skye stops suggesting they turn themselves in.

Ward walls off the rest, keeps it locked down.

* * *

The third week, they cross into Mexico.

He skirts Mexico City, keeps heading south. In Colombia they take ship for Indonesia.

* * *

His reflexes betray him. Betray Skye.

The freighter takes his credentials without question, but look sideways at Skye. Ward doesn't blame them. She has nothing of the look of a person who knows her way around a galley. Skye assures him she's found an on-line course on shipboard cooking and manages to charm the quartermaster.

They spend their off-shift hours in his bunk, making love to the long roll of the ship at sea. He grows used to waking up beside her, grows complacent.

If it had been May –

\- _She moved too fast for him to follow – smack of her skull against his chin, a lever of his arm over her shoulder, a fast roll – and then he was flat on his back, one of the pillows doubled awkwardly under one buttock, with her knees pinning his biceps and her thumbs digging into his carotids._

\- May, who had never dropped all her walls, even as she lay beside him; May, who had always known his breath before he drew it -

\- _He had grinned up at her, tasting blood on his teeth, the world going grey and distant. He palmed her ass with numbing hands until she relented and shifted her weight, a lioness's contented guttural growl as he urged her to slide up and let him put his mouth on her –_

\- but it's Skye, only Skye, who squeaks and struggles and then goes flat under his weight, face struggling free from the pillow, panting hard and on the edge of panic. "No, Grant, no, _don't_-"

His breath is still coming hard and his vision narrowed, but his stomach is clenching and now _he's_ hyperventilating, rolling off Skye, giving her space and then drawing her close, murmuring apologies, _so sorry, my god, are you all right, are you hurt, I never, I'm so sorry…_

Skye is stiff and curled tight for some moments, and Ward doesn't mistake that she lets him hold her for anything else. Gradually, she relaxes, slides an arm around his ribs, turns her face to lay her cheek on his chest. He keeps on stroking her hair, doesn't tighten his arms around her until she hugs him. Her gusty sigh is damp against his bare skin.

"Was…was it a bad dream? Or…a bad memory?"

He passes a hand over the silk of her hair, feeling the waves in it, the harshness of the spray she uses to keep the frizzes under control. "Memory. Just a memory."

Another sigh. When she speaks, the cheer is forced. "That's all in the past, SO. Won't happen again. No more bad times here, right?"

He swallows, stares at the ceiling above their bunk. "No, it won't happen again."

* * *

In Merak the ship offloads frozen chicken thighs, takes on transport containers of cotton shirts.

On deck, on break, he looks down on the dock and sees a woman in a dark dress, long black hair, shading her eyes to scan the ship rails.

When Ward looks back, the woman's hair has turned to dark brown, and grown curls.

They leave the ship in Odessa.

* * *

He never sees Garrett.

He has a list of things to say – he adds to the list some days, other days he trims it down _to you are a lying bastard_ and _I hate you_ and _everything I am is because of you_.

The longer list isn't much different than the shorter one, just longer.

But he never sees Garrett.

At least, not in the daylight. Not outside his dreams.

* * *

He tries to bury himself in Skye – his hands tangled in her hair, his face pressed to her shoulder, her legs wrapt tight around him, pulling him closer, deeper – and sometimes it works. Hours, even, when she dozes against his shoulder, the rumble of the road under the wheels putting her to sleep and letting him drive, on autopilot, just the empty road and the soft sounds she makes in her dreams. Sharp, crystalline moments at some sidewalk café when she has some new find to lay before him, delighting to show off her hacker skills and her slow, patient chewing at the infrastructure that was SHIELD's security wall and now has cracks and crumbling bricks from the roots of HYDRA.

But then a shadow passes across their table, casting the cups of cold coffee into darkness, - _close, too close_ \- and he looks up, realizing he's let his guard drop, watches the old man continue on down the sidewalk with a fuzzy grey dog on a leash.

Skye is a deep well that only opens to the stars, a sink that could draw him down and drown him beneath - in her thoughts, her dreams, her life.

For as long as that lasted.

* * *

She's better than when they began. Better, at the beginning, than Fitzsimmons.

He can still kill her in a pair of heartbeats.

* * *

In Belarus the HYDRA team is not interested in letting them escape. They send in two squads, and he doesn't realize there is a third until gun fire opens up behind him. He can't turn, he can't get to her, she's shouting something, he can't hear –

\- he can't hear because the next room is suddenly full of flame, an explosive roar that drowns all the sound in the universe. The whole building shudders, and Ward kills the last man before him even as he falls to the floor.

The joists buckle, floorboards twisting under him. He crawls to Skye across a doorway that is warpt out of true, the inner surface burnt away. Everything inside the room – everything that is left – is ash.

Except Skye. She trembles, everything is still shaking, and there is blood on her hands but it is not hers.

* * *

They take a ship to Casablanca and from there a flight to Atlanta. Skye finally falls asleep against his shoulder.

Two seats behind them, a pair of women chat in Japanese. Ward does not close his eyes the entire way.

* * *

He is no knight in shining armor. Skye, no matter what she may be – _demon, dragon, drow_ – Skye is no foundling princess, and no goose girl, either. There is no happy ending to this fairy tale.

If SHIELD takes them, if HYDRA does – he's a dead man, either way.

The difference is Skye. And so he brings them back to North America, to SHIELD's own backyard, where HYDRA might find them and SHIELD likely will and there is half a chance he can keep her free.

He's given up on _safe_.

He wakes in the night, coming up smooth and fast from sleep. Skye sleeps on, curled against him, the hibernation light on her laptop blinking an amber eye on the bedside table. Ward rolls off the bed and to his feet, collecting the Berretta from under the pillow as he eases his arm from under Skye's hair.

Headlights outline the curtains, betraying the worn patches that had been invisible by daylight. Ward sinks to his heels by the dresser. He still cannot place what woke him. The motel's cheap alarm clock reads 0142 in red block digits, and Ward knows that isn't right, but it's the tenth clock in two weeks and the twentieth in a month – he doesn't even remember what state they're in, only that they're somewhere north of I-20.

Then bootheels rap past on the sidewalk outside and a woman's silhouette flows over the curtains. Ward's breath catches and his vision narrows to a grey tunnel hovering over his weapon sights.

The woman – who ever she is – keeps walking. A light tenor calls out, and the shadow turns, raises a hand and walks out to the parking lot, her voice lost in the mutter of an early model sedan, turning over.

Ward remains crouched beside the dresser long after the car's engine passes into silence. When he rises, the countertop has pressed a line deep into his triceps.

"Hey," Skye says, her words no louder than gleam of her eyes in the dusklight. "Anything I need to worry about?" She does not move. One hand reaches out.

He shakes his head. She sighs, rubs her face against the pillow.

Her breath evens out into sleep long before Ward rises and returns to bed, the sidearm still in his hand.

* * *

He sees May every day. After seven months, he has almost stopped flinching.

* * *

It's a cloudy Tuesday in March, someplace west of Red Deer, in Alberta, when Ward sees May step out from the doorway to his left. His eyes flick toward her, and then away, so the pistol in her hand registers late –

\- _Late, late, too late, far too late_ –

\- after the barrel begins to sweep up.

Across the street, someone – Coulson – is pulling Skye from the pickup. She is fighting, hard, and Coulson's head snaps back – _broke his nose_.

But that's all from the corner of his eye, because May is right there, her weapon still coming up level -

_\- long arc up, she had it out, she was waiting for him, committed, weapon drawn in a civilian-crowded street_ –

\- and only after that does he process that it is a sub-sized SIG, not one of Fitzsimmon's toys –

_\- deer in the headlights, just standing there flat footed on the street, no flinch, no roll, just standing there, waiting for her –_

\- and he has no time to react, even if he could have.

He meets her eyes over the iron sights – steady, firm, resolute, and without the hate-thick grief he had expected. Without weakness.

That, too, she might have taught him.

Her forefinger flexes on the trigger, takes up slack. _I'm sorry_, he thinks. And, _thank you_.

The hammer falls.

_End_

* * *

**A/N: **Skye/Ward, May/Ward. Language, sex and violence. 3,700 words. Goes AU during S1-19 "Only Light In The Darkness." Characterization spoilers through the end of S1. Possibly entirely AU by this point. Thanks to FS, Best Beta Eva, and again, I'm sorry about the verb tenses.


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